SXSW: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Tagging

Heath Row (Mediadiet.net, far left of the picture): I met my girlfriend through a site called Consumating because of three tags: "Editor," "Hiking," and "New York." People talk about how tags are awesome and will change the world. They...

Heath Row (Mediadiet.net, far left of the picture): I met my girlfriend through a site called Consumating because of three tags: "Editor," "Hiking," and "New York." People talk about how tags are awesome and will change the world. They say tags should be consistent--and centrally controlled. What do the experts think?

On the panel are (left to right) Flickr Lead Designer George Oates, Consumating founder Ben Brown, and Thomas Vander Wal, a principal at InfoCloud Solutions Inc. and the man who coined the terms "Folksonomy" and "Info Cloud." Each had about 10 minutes to share their thoughts on tagging.
George: Flickr has over 400 million photos. 3,000 new photos a minute. 9 million unique tags in many different languages, and one subject will be tagged in many different ways. But even with all this diversity and different tagging systems, they're still incredibly useful. Here are some of the uses:

Events
When the Gates art installation opened in Central park a couple years ago, the word "Gates" spiked in the tag cloud. So following popular tags gives insight into what's going on in the world. Flickr was a source of instant news during the riots in Paris, with immediate and dramatic photo coverage.

Learning
(shows a photo of an azalea) Who knows what an azalea looks like? Anybody can find out easily through tag searching.

Attraction
Clusters group similar photos, and are denser than just using related tags.

Mimicry
The "dilo" tag stands for "day in the life of" and is used for groups of pictures of everyday or not-so-everyday happenings. There are now over 15,000 photos with the "dilo" tag.

Infection
George came up with a "do your worst" tag for pictures of people making ugly faces [[not people with inherently ugly faces, hopefully!]] The idea caught on around the world.

Inference
You can look at a tag cloud of every tag a user uses and get a good picture of who they are even without seeing the images themselves.

Nerdy Tagging
[[I couldn't quite catch what she said about this point, so if someone who was there reads this, please fill us in!]]

Now on to Consumate founder Ben Brown. Consumate is a personals site that attempts to match people or let them search for other users based on tags.

"People can take a look at my profile and see the kinds of things I'm into. We also allow other people to tag you. People use this as a poke, and sometimes people send compliments and flirty kinds of things. It's all free.

"It goes back and forth and you see very interesting conversations and descriptions going back and forth that tell you how people interact with others. Find people that have tags in common.

You can also use it to find people around you. The "SXSW" tag has over 100 people.

"90 percent of the people on the site use the tag "books"...is that a useful tag anymore? We decided combinations of tags and reasonably rare tags work best." So you can narrow your results by adding more tag terms until you find the perfect match.

"We'll be releasing the source code over the next couple weeks, so if you're a PERL coder, keep an eye out for that.

[[Thomas is up next.]]

The idea of taggins started around social bookmarking with del.icio.us. There are currently around 140 social bookmarking sites on the web with various interpretations.

Uses for tags are varied. For instance, public Libraries were using the wrong words in card catalogs, making it hard for users to find the books they were looking for. With user- generated tags, it's much easier. Museums can allow users to tag collections. Curators have a very different terminology from museum patrons. User tagging lets them see threads they might not have thought of before.

Sites like Last.fm lets you find bands using tags. "I know it's an American band...female vocalist"...and so on until you find the right band.

And tag terminology actually matters. There's a social connotation that necessitates accurate tagging for maximum usefulness. For instance, Social.network, Social_network, Socialnetwork, and Social-network are all del.icio.us tags, and all have their own groups of people that use them. So there is a difference.

As social tagging gets more popular, search is more effecting. Scaling is essential to accuracy.

Another use [[pulls up the Kevin Federline CD page and then another page with the hundreds of tags used for the Kevin Federline CD page ]].
We see here the word "Talentless," and we can use that to find other sites/people/photos/products tagged "talentless." Fun little exercise.

[[Sorry, that was kind of a dry writeup...hopefully I'll have more to say about future panels!]]

Kyle Monson is the Senior Editor for PCMag.com. He oversees and edits PCMag.com’s home page and product news coverage, and helps out with site maintenance and editing. He also oversees feature projects like the Top 100 Web Sites, and writes reviews and news stories.
Kyle is the Founding Editor of AppScout, a PCMag.com-affiliated blog covering software and Web applications.
Before joining the PC Magazine staff, Kyle wrote for Newsweek and several daily newspapers. He has a BA in Communications (Print Journalism) from Brigham Young University.
Follow Kyle on...
More »